How to Cure an Egg

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A cured egg is a versatile kitchen ingredient. If you cure it for 2 hours, you’d be able to achieve a soft and chewy texture that will put poach eggs to shame. If you cure it for 1 - 2 days, you’d be able to substitute cheddar cheese.

Most people think that curing an egg is a difficult task but all it only requires 3 ingredients: an egg, salt, and sugar.

Steps

  1. Mix 1:1 ratio of salt and sugar. The amount you mix depends on your container size and the number of eggs you are going to cure.

  2. Separate the egg yolk from the egg white. Feel free to save the egg white! But there is no use for it in this particular recipe.

  3. Pour the mixture on to a flat container. Gently place the egg yolk on the mixture like in the picture above.

  4. Cover the yolk fully with salt and sugar.

  5. Depending on your taste, you can cure the egg from 1 hour to several days! My recipe calls for 3 hours of curing.

  6. Once curing is done, wash your egg yolk so that it would not be too salty.

The rule of thumb for curing an egg is a 1:1 ratio between salt and sugar and that the amount of the combined ingredients will fully cover an egg.

What is curing or cured egg?

Curing is a food preservation process that could be date back a thousand of years. It’s a similar technique to curing a leg of ham for proscuitto! What happens in this process is that water inside of the food is sucked out through the process of osmosis.

Thus, something cured will have a much more concentrated flavor of the ingredient. Curing something over time will also kill bacteria as there are no more water pockets for the microbes to feed off.

How do other people do it?

As a huge cooking enthusiast I’m always in pain when I have to scavenge the internet to find out from what other resources people learn to cook. To simply this process, I’ve listed below videos and articles I read/watch to get to my dish!

The Splendid Table - Salted Egg Yolk

Jess Pryles - How to make soft cured egg yolk